AMERICAN REMAINS

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 31st from 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

The salon at automatic sweat is pleased to announce American Remains, an exhibition of sculptures and installations by SeMeN SPeRmS and Nick Stewart.

The exhibition presents a collection of artifacts from a proposed mythology that straddles the indistinct line between American history and rural legend. Inspired by the decrepit highway-side nowhere towns of the southwest, the works offer warped satellite dishes and abandoned single-wide trailers as the weathered remnants of westward expansion. These ubiquitous emblems of a proud historical narrative about a prosperous America are presented alongside idiosyncratic icons of contemporary desert folklore, characterized by supernatural suspicion, eerie phenomena and UFO sightings.

Nick Stewart’s objects seek to excavate desert myth in the form of mutilated cattle hides shaped into six-pack-rings, which have been branded with a design that evokes both astral patterns and the corporate logo of an automobile manufacturer. Familiar objects such as a dented street lamp are distorted into paranormal forms, while satellite dishes specked with metal lesions , assume a watchful, almost anthropomorphic presence.

SeMeN SPeRmS sculptures reconstruct and reframe the desolate desert scape from a distance, dwarfing its earthly immensity and depriving it of anthropological context until the barren topography starts to seem post-apocalyptic, if not entirely lunar. The homespun style of his miniatures elude to a tradition of model hobbyists, while the bleak content matter disturbs the quaint escapism of toy model sets. The artists’ American desert is not an open expanse of freedom shaped by the antiquated tale of manifest destiny, but instead a barren celestial surface, a post-apocalyptic wasteland and government test-site.

American Remains considers the place of this contemporary American folklore within the historical narrative of the nation, forcing questions about the filters that parse national fact from fiction, Roswellian syndrome from national heritage. In this exhibit, the patriotic voices of the founding fathers are forced into direct dialogue with desert dwelling lunatics preaching about crop circles from the pages of the national enquirer. It is both a history text book and a camp fire story; a CNN headline and a wives tale muttered by the town drunk from his bar stool pedestal.
written by Claire Bargout

Yokai Monsters is a series of Japanese tokusatsu movies created in the 1960s.

There were originally three movies made:

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)
Yokai Monsters: One Hundred Monsters (1968)
Yokai Monsters: Along With Ghosts (1969)
The films were produced by Daiei Motion Picture Company, and bear a resemblance to that studio’s other series, Gamera and Daimajin, and to other Japanese pop culture favorites like Godzilla and Ultraman.

Legend has it that the Yokai monsters will only interfere with human affairs when it is absolutely necessary. Things are quite awry, however, and it is time for these mythic figures to step in. A crooked magistrate and developer are booting the residents of an apartment building onto the street, and when the owner of the building tries to stop them, he is murdered. Now a masterless samurai must call upon the spiritual protectors of human kind in order to right the wrongs of his world.

Bolan at his best. No question: If there was any doubt in your mind; this proves once and for all that Bolan indeed rocks.

It’s interesting to contrast the two performances; in the 5:30 show the acoustic set is much stronger; in the 8:30 show, the electric stuff is sensational, leading off with a rousing version of CADILLAC. The restoration of the image from 16mm is absolutely first rate; most of the footage was rescued, along with the original stereo recordings, from 100s of rusting film cans in Ringo’s garage.

Marc and the band are in top form, somehow managing to cut through the teenybop adulation with real, loud, rock’n’roll. Whether or not Bolan’s Tolkien-esque lyrics are your cup of tea, Ringo Starr who filmed all this certainly knew enough about pop idols to keep the camera focused on Marc and let the myth take care of itself.

What’s surprising about the Wembley audience is the intensity on fans’ faces, both girls and boys — when Bolan breaks into a wicked version of “Summertime Blues” there’s just a hint of the Sex Pistols’ punk sneer that was just five years away.

Hot dogs and pizza. Bacon and ice cream — who says these tasty treats don’t go great together? Despite the fact that the prevalence of obesity in England has more than doubled in the last twenty five years, Pizza Hut UK has rolled out a pizza with a Hot Dog Stuffed Crust. Described as a “succulent hot dog sausage bursting from our famous stuffed crust,” the overstuffed pizza base is available across the pond for delivery with a “free mustard drizzle.”

✖ Brazil cult members arrested for cannibalism

Brazilian police announced Friday that they had arrested a man and two women on suspicion of having murdered and cannibalized at least two women in what was described as a purification ritual. The three defendants formed a sect called “Cartel” that seeks to purify the world and reduce the population, police spokesman Democrito Honorato from the northeastern Brazilian town of Guaranhuns told AFP.

This chaotic video shows a reporter getting yogurt and eggs thrown at him by some angry protesters on live TV. You’re probably wondering how the protesters got in the studio to begin with. Well, being Greek and having been to Greece on several occasions, I can safely guess that the security guards were most likely on their eighth smoke break of the day while the protesters snuck in behind their backs.

Thanks to Objectum Sexuality, the Statue of Liberty now has a lover, a three foot model the Greek God Adonis has a girlfriend and the Eiffel Tower has a wife, as does the Berlin Wall. What sounds completely bizarre to us is in fact normal to these four women who suffer from the psychological condition that makes them experience romantic feelings towards inanimate objects. Let’s delve a little deeper into their stories of love.

This is the 19-year-old girl who has eaten nothing but Margherita pizza for the past eight years. Sophie Ray, from Wrexham, Wales, has not had a proper meal since she was two, and from the age of 11 she has subsisted solely on cheese and tomato pizza. The teenager says she now gags if she touches anything but the takeaway meal, and even a slice of pepperoni is enough to turn her stomach.

A WOMAN who has eaten only cheese and tomato pizza for 31 years has been told she could DIE unless she quits her bizarre dining habit. Mature student Claire Simmons, 33, gags if she puts anything but a plain pizza slice in her mouth. She also SHAKES the moment she is presented with any other type of food. Now doctors have warned that her bizarre condition — known as Selective Eating Disorder — is increasing her risk of a stroke or heart attack in later life.

“As alleged, these six defendants operated a veritable pill mill,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. “The charged conduct was especially dangerous, as the defendants potentially victimized young children whose unsuspecting parents sent them to a day care center that allegedly doubled as a warehouse for thousands of their illegal pills.”

If your a girl in college you’ve found a great place to offer some GF services. You can offer what we call ‘flings’ to boys. An example of a fling would be offer to do a boys homework for money, sending him a text message about how much fun you had last night and how great he was in bed for the boy to punk his friends, changing your Facebook relationship status for $5 a day, offer to leave a few ‘girlfriend like’ wall comments on his facebook wall for $5 to make him feel special. The possibilites are endless. Boys can suggest flings on our home page and girls can see these ideas when they create a fling. To make sure you get paid we take the money from the boy when he orders your fling, when your flings duration is over with we then allow you to send it to your PayPal account. You can get your ex-gf back from that asshole by making her jelous. We offer categories that make it simple for guys to choose their ideal fake facebook girlfriend.

Offensive signs have been showing up some King County Metro buses. The signs, which look official and cite a state code, warn passengers, “Gang rape is strictly prohibited.” King County Metro’s Linda Thielke is aware of the signs and says the county has nothing to do with them. According to Thielke, the signs are likely the work of a prankster with a computer design program and too much time on their hands.

On November 13, 2010, 34-year old Jacksonville, Florida resident Christopher Chaney went hunting for unreleased nude photos of celebrities. According to court documents, he had the e-mail address for celebrity stylist and handbag designer Simone Harouche, but he didn’t have Harouche’s password. No matter; after connecting to Apple’s e-mail servers, Chaney used the password reset feature. He answered the required security questions by supplying publicly available information gleaned from the Internet—and he was in. What to do next?

A relatively monstrous SWAT style truck leads us to a whole new blob of police state developments, busy hands with little to do and a lot of hardware to do it. It’s yet another plateau of mad new security bureaucracy, something in this case I was loosely aware of tectonic plates moving, but a little digging revealed quite a nasty new nucleus. Let’s plow in and see what was beta-tested through the willingness of politicians to throw money at repressing immigrants. The results begin with big, black scary trucks. And the biggest intelligence group inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and more. Surprise!

Eiserman said a police officer was on routine patrol Friday when he pulled Woods over for a broken rear light and found marijuana in his car. When the officer searched Woods before placing him in the police cruiser, he discovered “a large bulge” in the front of his pants, Eiserman said. Story continues below. Police say Woods actually had the cojones to deny that he had any contraband down there. “He stopped him for the traffic violation, and one thing led to another,” Eiserman said. At the station, Eiserman said, police discovered that Woods had tied a large plastic bag around his penis that contained 89 small bags of suspected heroin and cocaine. Then things got messy. “I tried to remove it. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if it was nervousness or not, but he started urinating all over,” Eiserman said.

A rule change that would allow transgender women to participate in the Miss Universe beauty pageant next year is a step forward for equality, advocates said Tuesday after pageant officials announced the policy shift. Pageant officials said they are working on the language of the official rule policy change but expected final word to come soon. The rules will have to be approved by Donald Trump, who runs the Miss Universe Organization, and NBC. Trump and NBC co-own the contest. The announcement of the policy change comes a week after the organization decided to allow Vancouver’s Jenna Talackova to compete for Canada’s spot in the Miss Universe pageant this year. Talackova, 23, underwent a sex change four years ago after being born a male.

Those restrictions, represented most clearly in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), were initially supported by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who reportedly sent a letter to the Chamber of Commerce expressing solidarity with that bill’s ultimate goals. But as the Internet backlash began and a growing number of major websites joined a mass work stoppage protest earlier this year, the company insisted to reporters it had been “neutral” on the matter all along. This year, however, the company would seem to have compelling reason to join the fray at the level of their advancing competitors at Time Warner and Comcast. Both cable network operators have been angling to compete with Netflix by launching their own on-demand video services, along with implementing some policies like bandwidth caps that impose a monthly data limit, which limits the amount of time some users can spend watching streaming video on sites like Netflix.

LaMarcus D. Ramsey, 20, was in Autauga County Circuit Court to enter a plea on a charge of receiving stolen property. Circuit Judge John Bush took exception to the fact that Ramsey’s blue jeans were sagging too low. The three-day stint will be served in the Autauga Metro jail. “You are in contempt of court because you showed your butt in court,” a visibly irate Bush told Ramsey. “You can spend three days in jail. When you get out you can buy pants that fit, or at least get a belt to hold up your pants so your underwear doesn’t show.”

Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance. Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he’s raising funds to launch a national “non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption” that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity. The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also — and in practice this is likely more important — challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T; charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target. Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra. AT&T; demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages.

A new study by researchers at Loyola University suggests that the common notion that human urine is sterile is not always true. A post at the science blog Lab Spaces says that tests have shown that certain bacteria commonly inhabit the bladders of some women, and that new approaches to testing for and treating urinary tract infections (UTIs) are in order.

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week. Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News. “The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope — watch the bacteria move,” Miller said. “On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there,” he added.

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.

I thought it might be fun to offer a little context for this map (below), which has been making the rounds at Reddit and FlowingData. It shows Sweden and Finland with a fairly massive lead in metal bands per capita. Northern Europe and Scandinavia do well across board with Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and tiny Estonia besting the U.S. and U.K. by a considerable margin, as our colleagues at The Atlantic Wire have noted.

It has emerged that Michigan State Police have been using a high-tech mobile forensics device that can extract information from over 3,000 models of mobile phone, potentially grabbing all media content from your iPhone in under two minutes. The CelleBrite UFED is a handheld device that Michigan officers have been using since August 2008 to copy information from mobile phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The device can circumvent password restrictions and extract existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags. O2MOBILE SOFTWARE Cellebrite UFED 520×286 US Police Can Copy Your iPhones Contents In Under Two MinutesIn short, it can copy everything on your smartphone in a matter of minutes.

The reality is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. Yes, there’s the story contained within the bible itself, but that’s not a remotely historically admissible source. I’m talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists.

One of the most fascinating documents we came across was the BPD’s subpoena of Philip Markoff’s Facebook information. It’s interesting for a number of reasons — for one thing, Facebook has been pretty tight-lipped about the subpoena process, even refusing to acknowledge how many subpoenas they’ve served. Social-networking data is a contested part of a complicated legal ecosystem — in some cases, courts have found that such data is protected by the Stored Communications Act. In fact, we’d never seen an executed Facebook subpoena before — but here we have one, including the forms that Boston Police filed to obtain the information, and the printed (on paper!) response that Facebook sent back, which includes text printouts of Markoff’s wall posts, photos he uploaded as well as photos he was tagged in, a comprehensive list of friends with their Facebook IDs (which we’ve redacted), and a long table of login and IP data.

Eddie and I were in separate observation rooms, which were more like jail cells, as we awaited our respective criminal cases to be dealt with by the court. I was under a 24-hour per day suicide watch all the while I was confined there. A New York City correction officer was posted outside my room continually with each officer doing an eight hour shift. And Eddie was housed in a three man room almost directly across from me, and about ten feet away. Most of the time the guards allowed Ed and I to talk. Eddie’s case also graced the newspapers, at least for a few days. He was caught robbing from graves in a local cemetery. He told me he was a Satanist. And, if I remember correctly, he knew certain persons who were interested in purchasing his wares in order to use them for ritualistic purposes. But who these people were, I’ve no idea. And I think it was one of Ed’s friends who tipped off the police.

✖ Japan is Poisoning Other Countries By Burning Highly-Radioactive Debris

Burning radioactive debris does not destroy the radioactivity. It merely spreads it. Gundersen says that radioactivity from the burnt debris will end up not only in neighboring prefectures, but in Hawaii, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and California. Gundersen said that burning radioactive debris is basically re-creating the Fukushima disaster all over again, as it is releasing a huge amount of radioactivity which had settled on the ground back into the air.

The latest such high-profile example of this comes from Cheltenham, England, where a 14-year-old boy has been arrested after posting to Facebook a brief clip of himself and a 14-year-old girl engaging in an unspecified sex act (it’s unclear if it was just a clip or whether the whole thing lasted just a few pumps). The sex was consensual, all parties agree. The boy got off … lightly. Rather than ruin the mini-pornographer’s life with the scarlet letter of the sex offender registry, police gave him a “final warning,” which means it’ll all be expunged from his record in six years, barring any additional indecent incident.